Carefully timed launch announcement says Samsung Galaxy S4 is on its way

Samsung‘s next smartphone, the Galaxy S4, is one of the notable absentees from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. But the Korean firm chose this week to reveal a launch data, next month, on 14 March.

Samsung is known to have a follow-up to its wildly successful Galaxy S III smartphone, and it had been rumoured that it would show it at MWC 2013. The company quashed those rumours last year, and has now announced it will reveal all at an event in New York next month.

Samsung Galaxy S4 on its way

The phone is believed to be a five inch model with an OLED screen, bigger than the 4.8 inch display of the S III, according to reports.

The phone will “definitely” support 4G – and we can expect Samsung may aim to match the Cat 4 version of LTE, which allowed Huawei to steal a march at the start of Mobile World Congress, announcing the Ascend P2, which can (at least in principle) download at 150Mbps.

The announcement date was revealed in an invitation to an event which is being called “Samsung Unpacked”.

“We introduced the Galaxy S III in London last year, and this time we changed the venue (to New York)… as we were bombarded with requests from US mobile carriers to unveil the Galaxy S4 in the country,” according to a Reuters report, quoting Samsung Electronics’ mobile division chief JK Shin.

The phone is expected to have a full HD screen, at 1080 x 1920 pixels, and be powered by a quad-core procoessor, probably a 2GHz Exynos 5, according to mobile watchers across the web.

The biggest question may be whether Samsung will stick with the plastic bodies of Galaxy phones so far, which are very light, or move to a heavier, more durable metal body, as seen in the HTC One, launched just before Mobile World Congress.